Re: Fixing Broken System
> Due to an intermittent hard drive error which has since been fixed, my
> root partition has taken significant but not sweeping damage. Most
> binaries still work, but a few don't, such as df, cat, and mount. I
> don't know precisely how much was damaged, nor do I know an easy method
> of determining this.
I had the same problem, on a Mac Cube shipped via UPS ground.
I'd get lots of errors.
> That said, is there any way of forcing apt to reinstall all installed
> packages or something? From what I can tell, upgrade and dist-upgrade
> only reinstall changed packages. Or perhaps I can install the potato
> base and use my existing apt database to tell it what packages to
> install? What is the recommended way of recovering such a broken
> system?
-- STEP ZERO --
Make a backup: /root /home /etc /usr/local /boot /lib/modules
-- STEP ONE --
First you need to force the disk to allocate replacement sectors.
Use e2fsck, dd, cat, or the badblocks program to read your whole disk.
Do this without X running, so you can write down all the bad spots.
Then use "dd" to write something, like this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=4k count=1 seek=34234234
Be sure to not make a mistake! Whole disk or partition?
Ext2 blocks or 512-byte blocks? Bad spots are likely to
cover 10 to 1000 kB each.
-- STEP TWO --
Run "sync", wait a few seconds, then hit the power switch.
(seriously, to force a fsck pass at boot)
Reboot.
Repeat until fsck is happy.
-- STEP THREE --
/bin/rm -rf /mklost+found/*
apt-get install --reinstall apt gawk mawk dpkg-awk apt-utils
apt-get install --reinstall `dpkg --get-selections | awk '/install$/ {print $1}'`
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